I can see my platinum blonde hair framing my face from the corners of my eyes. I step onto the opening of the runway stage wearing a long, black, sheer dress held together with ties on each hip. It’s actually more of an Egyptian-style goddess dress, rather than a Greek one as my stage name indicates, but I don’t think anyone really cares about that but me. I start taking steps onto the stage in my high-heeled, laced-up, patent leather boots. I reach the end, where the pole waits for me. Lights shine in my eyes, and all of the people watching me are muffled in darkness.

To my right, is a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors where I see the image of a gorgeous, blonde bombshell moving with grace and flawless keeping with the music. I grab the pole with my right hand and begin to move around it, twirling myself as if the pole were my dance partner and we were in love. I stop and raise my left leg and wrap it around the pole. I arch my back and dip away from it. The music starts moving faster, and I follow it. I feel the rhythm, the bass, the lyrics with my entire being, and I become one with them. For a moment, I close my eyes and give in to the experience. A person approaches the stage with money in hand, so I move toward them and include them in my erotic, spiritual experience with the music. They pay me for it.

I repeat this process until the first song ends. Then I walk back to the stage’s opening and pull my dress up over my head. I turn around and approach the pole again. I tune out all of my nagging insecurities, “Do I have razor burn? What do my boobs look like when I do this move? Do they look saggy? Can people see my stretch marks under this light? Are my moves entertaining enough? Am I getting too old for this? Have I gained too much weight?” I squash all of that down, and I trust the process… a process I have repeated at least 8 times a night, 2 to 3 times a week for the last several years. I am at the top of my game, and I know it. I also know someday it will end, and that terrifies me. What would I do then?

That was me, living as the goddess archetype, a version of myself that existed when I was a dancer in my twenties. These days, I am homeschooling my autistic son, plagued with anxiety caused by past traumas. Since last April, I’ve been working with the same amazing therapist. Change is happening, and I keep flashing back to this same moment…

There on the stage, I was extremely vulnerable and yet extremely empowered at the same time. It was like the opposite of rape. Those people deeply desired me sexually, but they would never get what they wanted from me. I was fucking bulletproof. The music, the makeup, the costumes, the lights, the mirrors… they were the most comforting things in my life. Those things literally supported me, emotionally and financially. I felt safer in that strip club than I felt with most of my family.

Perhaps, I was primarily adored for my looks and unusual talent, but the only thing that mattered to me was being accepted and liked as a human being with flaws. For every salivating old man who hollered and threw money down at my feet, I gained an ounce of confidence that I was worth SOMETHING.

In my lifetime, I have been hurt so badly that I lost my faith in God and in my own fucking mother. I’ve harbored so much pain within me that it swallowed me up. It sucked the life out of me. I didn’t trust other people or myself. I didn’t trust events or circumstances. I didn’t trust any gods. I didn’t even trust the universe.

I feel like I’ve been rejected and abandoned by so many people, so many times, that at some point it became the constant focus of my mind… how to prevent myself from being hurt by other people. The pain is so deep that it cuts me up inside like a thousand knives. No one can see this happening to me, but it does, constantly.  I sleep with entire muscle groups activated, and have to play the same old comedy series I’ve seen a hundred times to keep me from thinking when I wake up for brief moments at night. The Office, How I Met Your Mother, That ’70s Show… those characters are my Ambien.

Most people feel anxiety at least some of the time, so most can relate to the pain an anxiety disorder can cause. Anxiety is the extreme of being uncomfortable. But let me explain to you in another way just how exhausting it can be. Imagine the fire alarm was going off in your home. You look all around and see no fire and smell no smoke. Even though there is no fire, the damn alarm just started going off for no reason. You reach up to turn it off, but it won’t turn off. You take out the fucking batteries, and it’s still going off. You try to pry it off the wall, but the thing is somehow fused into the very structure, and you can’t get rid of it without the whole fucking house falling down. You are stuck with this goddamn alarm going off day and night. Now fast forward a week, a month, a year, DECADES. That alarm is still going off, and you have to go to work, raise your child, pay bills, write school papers, and try to start a blog, all while listening to that damn alarm. This has been my life since I was nine years old. I am so. fucking. tired.

The weight of guilt that I live with over things I cannot, and have never been able to, control has become like armor on my small frame. I was born a product of my DNA. I grew up in poverty in the Midwest in a Christian-dominant, privileged, and ‘free’ country. This combination molded me. It shaped me beyond my control into the exact personhood that I am now. Regardless of my own wishes, there were certain facts about my existence which left me no choice but to succumb to this here and now.

I learned so many lessons from the painful things in my past. It shaped me into someone who can relate, and wants to relate, to the pain of others. It drives me. I don’t want anyone to feel alone… ANYONE. When I know that a person is silently hurting, I automatically feel connected and compelled to reach out, even if they barely know me, because I know that nothing makes a problem feel bigger than being isolated with it. I’m very aware that I’m not qualified to ‘fix’ someone’s problems, but I have some big ears (not literally), and I know from so much of my life that when I had access to just one person who was willing to listen to my problems, sometimes that was enough to get through the hardest of times. Sometimes it was a family member or a friend, or a teacher, or a therapist. Sometimes it was a stranger.

You are part of an audience I have imagined since I was a child; the people who might resonate with my writing, the people who could actually take something from all of this and use it to help themselves. I’ve had experiences that others may have been through, and they would know just how much it fucking sucks. I just want to let you know that if that is you, you are not alone. That’s all any of us really needs to get through this fucked up hell circus in which we find ourselves. We just need to know we aren’t alone, and then we can make it through.

Sometimes that realization comes from hearing a song. That one song that encapsulates your experience of that moment in time perfectly. Music is always leading me in an eerie way. It inspires me to write suddenly, and for long periods, and the thoughts magically flow onto the screen like raw tender puzzle pieces of my personality.

If another human being can relate to what I’m saying, and no longer feel alone, then I have done my job as an artist. Any artist, whether poet, or painter, or musician, all of the genius ways in which people portray their emotions, their only purpose is to connect to people through their chosen mode. Art is the physical equivalent of feelings. It is the materialization of emotions through human beings. That’s what makes art art.

My list of heroes consists of people who were able to make a legendary connection with others, and most of the time, those kinds of heroes struggle in very real ways with their demons. Hemingway was a notorious alcoholic. Picasso cut off one of his fucking ears. Virginia Woolf drown herself in a river. Others were famously assassinated or overdosed. People who make a real difference almost always live different lives. I don’t fit into the ‘ordinary’. It hurts so much just trying. I am so utterly terrified of other people, it’s almost a cosmic joke. I know that we need human connection for proper psychological functioning, but every interaction with someone else is a possible trigger to the seemingly infinite wasteland of negative thoughts and feelings within me.

It’s so hard to imagine being capable of success because I see myself as equal with all other humans, and I don’t believe that I deserve MORE than someone else simply because I happen to animate this particular body. I understand that, at its basic core, life is random. The fact that you or I ended up in this place and time was not a reward or punishment. It was chance. None of us CHOSE to be who we are. We all take our first breaths holding our own unique set of cards, 46 to be exact. That mish-mush of ancient DNA sets the stage for your play, the setting and time are chosen for you. The curtains open, the bright light of the world outside your mother’s womb greets you, much the same as the white light rumored to greet us when we die.

I went back to college a couple years ago. I started pursuing Philosophy in order to sharpen my writing and critical thinking skills. It’s paid off. I can tell my writing is better, my research is better, and even my confidence has improved… within my school forum. But I still cower from the great internet monster. I’m so fucking afraid of you, reader. I hope you realize how bad my fingers shake as I type; how much wine I have to drink to get here. But, like any other type of artist, the writer in me exists whether or not I write. The words become stifled and stuck, trapped within my body as painful knots in my abdomen and shoulders, with a jaw like an iron vise. You’re so fucking scary. Your thoughts. Your opinions. You hold so much power from your side of the screen. Baring my body for gawking strangers was a cakewalk compared to this. You are witnessing the revelation of my broken, cauterized soul.

The very worst part of it all is feeling judged. It’s driving me crazy. I project these images of potential disasters almost constantly. Every new piece of external input can trigger an instantaneous threat response in me. But, this response can more easily be triggered by the alarming thoughts that creep up seemingly out of nowhere. I don’t even need external provocation, just the THOUGHT of danger can send me into an internal frenzy. My body is constantly on alert, like that moment when the prey darts its head up, startled by a sound, its neck stiffened in fear. Welcome to my constant reality. There. I am stuck there. There is always a lion staring me down. He never gets tired, he never gets bored, he never takes his fucking eyes off of me. If I stop worrying for one millisecond and try to ‘relax’, he will eat me alive in a heartbeat. So, I stay vigilant in preparation for the inevitable attack. It has been my experience that every time I have thought it was safe to let go, I was attacked again. At one point, my entire torso became so filled with tension that it was like permanent armor protecting my heart. I just can’t risk getting hurt again. I have had enough in this life. I have had more than my fair share. I just don’t understand why.

And my therapist told me just the other day to change that question, “Why?” She said to replace it with, “What now?” But I’d like to phrase it to be more like my own dialect, “What the fuck now?”

Now…

You are about to watch Athena slay the lion.

This post inspired by “I’m An Animal” by Neko Case. Listen here.

 Click image to purchase song.

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